Topic for #78: Ayn Rand on Living Rationally

Bowing to repeated listener requests for an Ayn Rand episode, on the eve of 6/9/13 the regular PEL foursome started our discussion, got tired after a couple of hours, and recorded some more on 6/13. We plan to edit the result heavily enough to reduce the amount of frustrated kvetching ("Is that actually supposed to be an argument? Why does she think just saying that and moving on is in any way adequate?"), but it's not going to make objectivism fans happy, I can tell you. Know that we did make an honest attempt at engaging the material, though it was hard going, and not in the way that difficult passages in Heidegger are.

Rand offers up a foundationalist system that is is supposed to be in accord with modern science and based on empirically evident premises and clear reasoning from those that anyone who isn't being self-deceptive or otherwise dense should be able to reproduce. Every perception we have reveals to us that the world exists (thus skepticism is incoherent and impossible as a practical matter), and a properly scientific understanding of concepts will show us that all legitimate tools of thought are based on abstractions from perceptual experience of concrete objects.

Applying these principles, she argues that we can clearly see that Man is essentially a rational animal, and thus that Man's good (his virtue, and ultimately his happiness) is the exercise of his rational faculties. Rationality is the essential tool we have for survival, and the survival instinct, when rationally interpreted, reveals that our good is not just staying alive but staying alive qua Man, living up to the potential we have as humans, which is to be maximally overflowing with Life.

But don't think that this "Life" is just some romantic notion of raw energy: as Man, we channel our energy so that we only have (or at least act on) rational maxims. I as a clear-thinking individual should passionately pursue only realistic goals, and should not let all those irrational people out there serve in any sense as the measure of my success. This doctrine that the individual's mind is this fountainhead of all accomplishments of value somehow entails that it would be incoherent for my good to conflict with that of any other rational mind. Yes, we might compete in some venues for the same good (e.g. we both want the same job), but the competition itself serves both of us, whichever of us wins (i.e. if there weren't multiple applicants, then the hiring system somehow wouldn't work). Ethics (as Nietzsche thought) is ultimately about "I will" and not "Thou shalt" -- it's a tool we need to live and thrive -- but as individuals, our excellence cannot lie in others: we should neither need other's compassion (though we can certainly enjoy it if we find virtue in the person being nice to us) nor need the subservience or others. We should not be takers, but only traders.

So it's a neat and tidy picture that many find an inspiring alternative to all the endless debating and nitpicking that comprises academic philosophy. It's practically oriented, encourages self-esteem and productive work, and if you're already inclined to support laissez-faire capitalism and the idea that taxation is theft, then here's an intellectual framework that will tell you that you're exactly and indubitably right. But is it really a rational world-view that you can argue from the ground up, or is much of this post-hoc rationalization of a particular breed of sentimentalism best understood by examining the psyche and social circumstances of both Rand and her die-hard adherents? You decide!

The Virtue of Selfishness (online version). In this book we only all read the lead essay from 1961, "The Objectivist Ethics," which you can read here, and an essay from 1962 called "The 'Conflicts' of Men's Interests," which you can hear Rand herself read here.

In preparation for the episode, I also listened to The Fountainhead, which mostly made me roll my eyes but was well-performed enough to be tolerable if you want a better idea of how Rand thinks moral psychology works.

I also took in at double speed maybe the first 20 episodes of Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism Q&A podcast (iTunes link). As he's her appointed successor and executive of her estate, he pretty well conveys the philosophy in a lived-in manner that's a bit more revealing--and often less radical-sounding--than Rand's essays.

Comments

“Why does she think just saying that and moving on is in any way adequate?”

Her purpose in her writing was to get down her ideas, to write exactly what Objectivism is. Instead of writing about what her philosophy is not and go into detail upon detail she chose not to go that way and just lay out the whole system. That was her personal choice, nothing inherent in her philosophy prescribes against such polemics. My guess would be to put it succinctly is that she probably would be bored by such an undertaking. Rand was very much against “duty” and that applies just as well to the task of writing. It is not her duty/job to explain everything there is to know about Objectivism; it might help others but that would be a sacrifice on her part. She wrote what she wanted and to that extent that it clarified her philosophy and ideas.

Her audience was the general reader. I think she assumed that stating her disagreement w/ philosophers/intellectuals whom she did disagree would be sufficient. It would then be up to the intelligent reader to look further for other sources of explanation on the detailed errors of those philosophers. Of course if someone were to actually take the time to understand Objectivism down to its fundamentals through and through they would then be able to understand why Rand disagreed with those she did and on what points. This has been part of the growing body of secondary work on her philosophy. As her ideas are explained they rub up against the current context that people hold and it becomes necessary to show how Rand’s ideas contrast with that of other philosophers and intellectuals.

I can safely say that folks like Michael who apparently have a Google alert out for Ayn Rand and jump in to instantly defend her wherever she is defamed, i.e. mentioned, on the Internet are not the target audience here.

However, I’m grateful for any factual corrections that you or others might wish to extend to help the Rand-curious in our audience, which I think is a substantial group (though the line between curious and morbidly curious is thin in this case).

It’s not uncommon for people to claim that if you object in good faith to something that you haven’t taken the time to understand it, much like Rand never took the time to understand Kant, or Wittgenstein, or positivism, or Nietzsche for that matter (though there are so many scholarly takes on Nietzsche and she did at least read a lot of his work and let it permeate her in some positive ways, so I’ll forgive her on that one). I deal with that issue on every episode we do, and while in most cases I feel like I only scratched the surface, in this case Rand’s body of work is much smaller and (by her own design) more single-themed, so while I haven’t read Atlas Shrugged (I watched most of the first movie, which in terms of objective cinematic quality is simply not good at all), nor her essay on Capitalism (which we’ll talk about more in future episodes… just not reading Rand on it), I’ve spent a good deal of time now on her over the past month (and further) such that I’m pretty confident that more would yield diminishing returns for me. Just my judgment call, of course, but it’s all I’ve got.

Re. your Twitter comment about ad hominem, it’s not a matter of Rand dismissing other philosophers because they’re black or Russian or Nazis or whatever. It’s that she thinks that her fundamental insights should be obvious to any clear-thinking individual and so has to explain why obviously smart people would disagree with her by accusing them of evasion, which is on the same epistemic ground as Marxist charges of false consciousness or Freudian charges of repression: it’s saying “I know your mind better than you do” in a way that certainly should not be open to someone like Rand given her epistemology of relying on your direct experience.

Unsurprisingly, Rand and her followers are constantly the subject of similar attacks. If someone says things you find to be irrational, at some point you stop listening to them and start diagnosing them. The lack of productive dialogue goes both ways.

Ouch Mark that hurts. No, not really though. I’ve acquired a thick skin when it comes to reading other people’s musings on Rand. And I already know I’m not your target audience, but that doesn’t stop me from listening to what others say and how they approach ideas, Rand’s or any others. So there is not “jumping” on my part of “wherever” Rand is “defamed”. I’m rather selective: time is limited and the quality of the discussion has to be worth it. (You can take that as a compliment if you like.) I appreciate your comments here though I still disagree with your evaluation.

I don’t consider time the determining factor in which one becomes familiar w/ new material. It certainly can help. It’s more a matter of properly integrating the new ideas into your own context of knowledge to see whether your ideas are right or the new material is and whether you should adopt it. However, all that is too abstract for such a comment as this and is not directed at you or any one single person here (I don’t know you enough to make such claims). Though I would like to hear your thoughts on her concept of “psycho-epistemology”. It is a very interesting potential field of study. Rand wrote a few things on it and I know Dr. Binswanger gave two lectures on the subject here:

It’s interesting. You’ve inserted yourself and your summary judgements of Rand into your blog posts. You go out of your way to let us know when something is tedious or annoying to you. You describe writing as “crazy sounding” and draw in third party criticism as its own entire blog post.

This doesn’t follow the pattern for most other philosophers covered by PEL. Why the unique treatment of Rand?

Dover, you’re just wrong on the facts here. PEL routinely points out what they find tedious or annoying or crazy-sounding about many, if not most, of the philosophers they cover on almost every episode. I could cite specific examples (off the top of my head, the episodes on Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, the New Atheists, Seth on any of the analytic philosophers, etc.). The list of writers who haven’t received such treatment is at least as long as the list of those who did.

Also, Mark goes out of his way to insert himself and his summary judgments for many, if not most, of the writers they cover on the show or the blog. How is that new?

Perhaps it’s equally plausible to suggest that you haven’t noticed the criticism PEL so often directs toward other philosophers covered on the show, because you don’t feel such a personal stake in them?

Just to back up Daniels point I just happened this morning to go back and listen to the Husserl episode, as I’ve become increasingly interested in understanding phenomenology. The amount of pre-discussion kvetching about Husserls writing is hilarious (it’s actually a feature I’ve come to love about PEL in general). I believe the phrase “death march” was bandied about.

Daniel is correct. We do not see our job here as giving an impartial presentation of someone’s thought, but of making our experience of engaging with that thought public. It’s always personal, and if you find our idiosyncrasies more irritating than not, then PEL is not for you. However, Dover is right that the actual topic announcement is not usually so personal, and that has to do with the somewhat unique experience we had reading and talking about this. I think I’ll need to let the episode go up (it’ll be a couple of weeks) before saying much more.

The PEL guys tend to joke about those thinkers whom they find funny or worthy of mocking.

I can recall jokes about Foucault (did he wear leather?) on the Foucault episode, about Pirsig and about others.

When I first started following these podcasts well over a year ago, I even wrote them complaining about their joking. I’ve gotten used to it with time. It’s good that they are irreverent. There’s a big difference between lack of reverence and lack of respect.

I am one of those with a Google Alert for Ayn Rand–but with a difference. I am a professional philosopher (full disclosure: only semi-academic; the last time I taught at a university was in 2002, and I’ve never been full-time). I have a 400 page book on epistemology from an Objectivist orientation that’s in publication as we speak. I spent my life (and I’m 68) working on Objectivist philosophy.

Okay, from that standpoint I find your summary to be pretty accurate. Obviously, I disagree with your evaluation, but that’s another matter.

I just want to register a couple of interesting places where, with all due respect, you got something wrong by implication.

1. “all legitimate tools of thought are based on abstractions from perceptual experience of concrete objects.”

To be clear, it should state: “all concepts are based–directly or indirectly–on abstractions from . . .” As you probably know, she regarded the process of concept-formation as recursive, and the third chapter of Intro. to Objectivist Epistemology is titled, “Abstraction from Abstractions.”

2. “Applying these principles, she argues that we can clearly see that Man is essentially a rational animal, and thus that Man’s good … is the exercise of his rational faculties.”

This formulation makes it seem that she holds three things that are in fact very alien to her.
a) Complex conclusions (e.g., about what is the essential nature of man) are not, she held, obvious or self-evident.

b) She held that “Man is a rational animal” is a biological statement. It is not just a statement about what is unique about man, it is a statement about what man’s “ecological niche” is–what his means of survival is. (That’s one reason why it’s not self-evident.)

c) Most importantly, she did not hold, a la Aristotle, that we should be rational because that’s our “essence.” The “thus” in your statement makes it seem like her argument is that kind of deontological thing (since E is our essence, we must actualize it). Rather, she held that allvalues are hypothetical, none categorical. Morality is grounded in a choice–the choice to live. In her radical attack on deonotological ethics, “Causality Versus Duty,” she wrote:

“Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.

“Reality confronts man with a great many “musts,” but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: “You must, if—” and the “if” stands for man’s choice: “- if you want to achieve a certain goal.” You must eat, if you want to survive. You must work, if you want to eat. You must think, if you want to work. You must look at reality, if you want to think- if you want to know what to do- if you want to know what goals to choose—if you want to know how to achieve them.”

I’m a (very) long time Ayn Rand fan who also follows Google Alert. Mark’s article leaves me a bit puzzled as to his exact differences with her philosophy. Does he differ with her belief that we should be rational? That we should have a free society? That we should deal with one another by trade rather than by force? Her heroic view of man? Her theory of concept formation? Her view that our senses give us actual facts that we can integrate into additional truths? That we should be (rationally) selfish and not altruistic?

What exactly?

Unlike most Ayn Rand critics, Mark eschews ad hominem attacks but does seem put off by the fact that she was “radical-sounding.” As for her philosophy being a rationalization for “sentimentalism,” she emphasized that political systems are a consequence of more fundamental philosophical beliefs and went to great lengths to make that point. In this regard, I highly recommend The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff which was written under Ayn Rand’s editorship:

Thanks for the comment. I’ve posted a few recent blogs here about aspects of Rand that get on some differences, and I’m going to have to defer a general answer until the episode comes out. A few things come to mind though:

1. Rand thinks that you can’t use reason to criticize reason (i.e. put limits on reason), that if you do it’s the fallacy of the stolen concept. On the contrary, reason is the only tool we have to probe its own limits. And her claim against using the senses as the skeptics do to cast doubt on the senses doesn’t work for the same reason; we can generalize from mirages and the stick that looks bent when placed in water that maybe some comparable distortion is going systematically when we sense things. I think there are other reasons to discount wholesale skepticism, but her arguments don’t work in this respect.

2. Her claim that intentionality (the fact that all consciousness is consciousness of something) implies metaphysical realism is simply false. See Husserl’s whole project, in particular his notion of the epoche, which is the idea that we can sensibly acknowledge this structural feature of our experience without drawing any metaphysical conclusions at all about it.

3. I don’t think the project of founding all concepts on abstractions from sensible concretes (and then abstractions from those abstractions) works. (See Carnap’s valiant attempt at this: our ep. 67.) I don’t think that method is sufficient to give one the vocabulary that you need to do philosophy at all. I don’t think this is how it works psychologically and in the construction of terms in language (see our Wittgenstein episodes 55 and 56), and think it’s arbitrary and unworkable to insist on it normatively, i.e. that however we in fact do concept formation, Rand’s is the way we should. Of course we need to define our terms within a particular discourse to the degree that we want to ensure that we’re not talking past each other, but that is not the same as anchoring them in some rigid hierarchy that solidifies thought to an ooze. If Rand actually followed that herself, she could never have written the Fountainhead, and her own philosophical prose would not have been so frustratingly ambiguous and underdeveloped such that folks would feel the need to write 400 page books decoding it like she was Confucius or the Oracle at Delphi. On the contrary, I think the requirement is merely used as a weapon to a priori deny that someone trying to say anything new is making any sense. (Or have I missed the Objectivist tracts grappling charitably with Heidegger, Deleuze, and the like?)

4. She (and Peikoff) mischaracterize the analytic-synthetic distinction (I’ll create a separate post at some point on http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/rand.htm, which someone on Facebook just pointed me to, as it includes a lot of review of basic philosophy concepts. …Though I don’t think all of its views are uncontroversial, e.g. Russell didn’t think you needed Frege’s distinction between sense and reference either, and I don’t think rationalism as opposed to empiricism regarding mathematical and logical truths is as obvious as Huemer makes it sound there.

5. Her argument for Man being a rational animal just isn’t sufficient for doing what she wants it to do. All animals have a survival instinct; we are peculiar in that we need our brains to survive; therefore, we’ve grounded the entire Nietzschean conception of Life as eudaimonic flourishing in such a way as to rule out both Aristotle’s claim that we are fundamentally social (and not individual) animals and Nietzsche’s own view that this Life exhibits itself in “virtues” (magnificent fonts of energy, e.g. raging Homeric emotions, Goethe/Mozart-like talents) which not only conflict with other peoples’ but with each other within the same person? No, no “biological” observation is going be sufficient to ground that, and again, the whole way Rand actually operates in feeling out moral psychology in the Fountainhead belies any such pretense at strapping her many insights to a reductionist system of epistemology. Judgment calls about people’s behavior are always going to be judgment calls, involving intuitive (in the sense of Myers Briggs personality testing, not in terms of magic faculties of knowing) synthesis and not just induction involving explicit principles. In short, while her epistemology may work on defining tables and chairs (though even that involves some smuggled in pragmatism that she denies), it’s inadequate to found the social sciences and inadequate to ground ethics.

While I share your sentiments about “a society of obscene economic inequality”

To try to be fair to Ayn Rand, so as not misrepresent her, I think you are misunderstanding her definition and usage of “altruism”. For her it was more like abject self sacrifice or slavery.

She wasn’t saying, if you choose to, you can’t give to charity or help a friend or even a stranger.

I’m copying and pasting this from a comment of mine from “The Self and Selfishness (and Aesthetics and “The Fountainhead”)” post because it explains her objection to “altruism” and what she meant by the term.

She was born in Russia and her father Zinovy Rosenbaum was a successful pharmacist, eventually owning a pharmacy and the building in which it was located. She was twelve at the time of the February Revolution of 1917. Her father’s pharmacy business was confiscated and the family displaced in the name of the common good or for the good of society. After graduating from high school in the Crimea at 16, Rand returned with her family to Petrograd (the new name for Saint Petersburg), where they faced desperate conditions, on occasion nearly starving.

And so I would suggest seeing her philosophy and reading her books with this as the back drop that she’s arguing against. Which if you know this about her life it is very easy to see in all of her books.

I’m not a philosopher and will have to read your prior articles before I can comment on them. But I can discuss your point 1 now, as it is by far the most important.

Ayn Rand’s fallacy of the stolen concept is, really, the law of non-contradiction applied in the context of her hierarchical view of conceptual knowledge. Essentially, knowledge is a growth process, and (most of) our knowledge is held in the form of concepts. One cannot use a higher level concept while omitting or denying more fundamental concepts upon which the higher level concept is dependent upon for its legitimacy. One cannot, for example, maintain that “reality is just an illusion” because illusions are misapprehensions of reality. If there were no reality, there could be no illusions. Even illusions are real illusions, people actually being fooled by a card trick, for example.

One cannot rationally determine that man does not have the faculty of reason because such a statement is an obvious contradiction. If one lacks the power of reason, he can make NO rational criticisms.

And, as Ayn Rand wrote, there are no contradictions in nature.

There are no non-rational humans rationally concluding that they lack the power of reason.

I’m not going to have time into responding a lot of your comments here, though I thank you for making them, and I encourage you to find out what you’re missing in the rest of the philosophy world by maybe going going back and listening to our first few episodes, where you’ll see that we too are very suspicious of what academic philosophy has to offer, though I find it largely fun myself, really whether or not I think the reading is rock-solid.

But re. this point about skepticism about sense perception, I feel it would be good practice for me to try to respond:

I’m wondering what kind of claim it is to say that sense perception gives us reality, because the word “reality” is not basic, but actually pretty loaded/ambiguous.

We use “reality” in practical contexts to distinguish from perceptual mistakes, from dreams, from the referents of lies, etc. So yes, of course, you might say “by definition,” perception in general gives us reality. But is a scenario like The Matrix really self-contradictory then? In such a scenario, there is practical reality (the matrix), but anyone that “wakes up” from the matrix is not going to call the matrix reality any more. So the everyday experience of illusion vs. regular perception is sufficient to give us the idea of reality, but once we have that idea, then it becomes an ideal, it overleaps our actual experience. We wonder about scenarios like the matrix, or Descartes’ brain in a vat, or Chuang Tzu wondering if he’s really a butterfly dreaming he’s Chuang Tzu.

It’s not sufficient to just dismiss these scenarios as highly unlikely. On what basis would we be able to say “unlikely?” On the basis of our experiences so far. But the point of the scenarios is that reality as an ideal is supposed to cover the whole base of existence, not just the part covered by our experience, which is of course a very small part indeed.

But it would be foolish to let this kind of consideration undermine one’s faith in ordinary science, and I don’t think any mainstream views would be worried by this. Kant, for one, says something to the effect of “Okay, well, that’s right: the world of appearance is revealed by our senses, which interact with the world (whatever it may ultimately be) in lawlike ways given that we’re human, and that gives it objectivity. You can’t just deny it based on whim; science and even ethics are objective and can be read out of our experience of the world.”

You can see already how Rand’s comments about Kant are totally misguided; he’s not at all a subjectivist. However, he does want to leave room for some possible world behind appearances that our faculties just can’t access undistilled. It may be that the real world corresponds point to point with our experienced world, but it may well not be. We just don’t/can’t know.

Now immediately after Kant, people like Hegel, Nietzsche, and others decided that this distinction between the Thing-In-Itself (ultimate reality) and the world of experience (science) is silly; the Thing-In-Itself is doing no theoretical work at all, and in fact Kant only thinks there needs to be such a world-behind-the-world in order to explain why it is that different people experience the same things. So there were several strategies for dealing with this, but a number of them amounted to saying simply that the world “reality” as we use it doesn’t refer to this “ultimate reality,” but just to experienced reality. If it turns out there are other unseen aspects to reality that we don’t see (and of course there are; the molecular level, for one), then we’ll just call them ASPECTS of reality, and understand that while we all do experience reality, we of course don’t get all its aspects. Do we get all the aspects that are or would be important to us? Well, maybe or maybe not. We might still discover that we’re in the matrix, or that everything is made of God, or any of that, but as we have no reason to think that, we can comfortably proceed on the assumption that this isn’t the case unless we’re proven otherwise.

So the end result of this line is a practical attitude that is much like Objectivism’s, but it’s more humble, more pragmatic, less sure of itself. It says “we’ll call this reality, and call it that by definition, because it WORKS to do so, because science works, but if we run into something really weird like quantum uncertainty, we really don’t have a basis for ruling out a picture that seems to fly in the face the practical reason of the everyday.” Maybe it says “well, I have no reason to believe in God, so I won’t, but hey, maybe I’m wrong. I’m not going to be religious and will try to keep religion out of public policy, but I’m not going to be a dick about it.” Rand seems to think that self-certainty is a necessary part of self-esteem, of enabling us to reach our full potential, and that makes her dismissive of so many of the real, intelligent human beings around her. I don’t agree with this approach.

Rand was against the pursuit of money for money’s sake. None of her heroes do this, and the one that comes closest to being a wealth seeker (Rearden) doesn’t ultimately make the cut. This is one of the common misconceptions of Rand’s proscription for how to live. Also, the fact that Jobs and Gates both manipulated the governmental corporate finance system to benefit there own businesses and otherwise dismissed fair and open competitive practices makes them a far cry from John Galt. Rand is stunningly idealistic and actually proscribes a number of actions that would seem short run self-defeating.

I don’t mean to seem disrespectful, but your points 4 and 5 suggest that you have read very little of Ayn Rand’s works. But then, I’ve read very little modern philosophy. Long ago, I concluded that it was a waste of time. In my day (’60’s), you could hardly find a philosopher who would admit that the term “reality” meant anything. And skepticism was rampant.

Who cared about the ramblings of people who were claiming that man (including them) could know nothing and that reality is not real?

Why continue on mocking people? You don’t know Burke well enough to make such hasty generalizations about their aptitude for learning in regards to Rand’s philosophy nor in its application in their personal life. Respect here is needed.

You seem to entirely miss the point of that particular quote. That is understandable given that it lacks some context. Or you may not have contemplated it. I may not know Burke, but I am familiar enough with the type – defenders of the faith.

Go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you.

The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies, he must also be able to hate his friends.

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath?

You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you.
You say that you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers—but what matter all believers?

You had not yet sought yourselves; and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little.

Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.

I got the meaning the first time and the slight of yours was not necessary (“may not have contemplated it”) merely insulting. I understood the meaning and by saying that it does not seem to apply to Burke given what he’s said. He expressed the opinion that given the experiences he’s had in the past and his judgment of them he chose to follow Ayn Rand. He made no claim as being a “defender of the faith” as like a dogmatist accepts everything for no objective reason. You seem to confuse certainty or even certainty in some issue with dogmatism. Now he expressed a statement but he didn’t give you the full context of reasoning as to why he holds to all of Ayn Rand or maybe even just some of her ideas. That is why I called your comment hasty.

I agree with Nietzsche’s sentiment on his statement (as did Rand), if not in its entirety. But as an outside observer of someone else’s cognitive process it would be difficult to determine whether they adhere to such a principle. Such an evaluation might only be left to the individual himself.

When you dismiss Mark’s comments about Ayn Rand, you imply the problem is that Mark simply hasn’t read enough of Rand’s books. Yet when you dismiss the “ramblings” of “modern philosophy,” you’re freely willing to admit that you didn’t read very much of it before you decided it was a “waste” of your time.

Can you see how the double-standard you construct might be considered disrespectful, whether or not you mean it to be?

I don’t see Steve Jobs, Gates or Mother Theresa as benefactors of mankind.

Steve Jobs marketed expensive, well-designed gadgets, all of which can be substituted by cheaper, less trendy products. His factories in China are well-known for exploiting labor in ways that remind one of a Dickens novel.

Gates monopolized the market for operating systems by running less aggressive companies out of business through unscrupulous business practices. Now he’s giving his money away, which is a plus in his favor.

For benefactors of mankind, how about Dr. Jonas Salk who refused to patent and profit from the polio vaccine which he invented and countless other doctors, nurses, teachers and even PEL podcasts who often for less than glamorous wages contribute to making this world a safer, more rational and more caring place?

You ask whether people are entitled to receive the value of what they produce. That depends what you mean by “value”. I believe that our actions are valued by the recognition and gratitude that they receive and that those who do good, for example, Dr. Salk, are entitled to due recognition and gratitude.

If we owe gratitude and recognition to Mr. Jobs or Ms. Rand, then we should manifest it.

On the other hand, I believe that wealth and goods in the broadest sense of the word (healthcare,
education, balanced diet, recreation, clean environment) should be distributed as equally as possible among all human beings, taking into account varying needs and temperments, without consideration for ability to pay.

I disagree with most of your observations for all the reasons that an Objectivist would disagree with any socialist. But the base of Ayn Rand’s disagreement with you would be your obvious acceptance of altruism, the idea that one should dedicate himself to others, be selfless, and practice self-sacrifice. She wrote that the morality of altruism can be destroyed with an argument consisting of one word:

Because I care about other people, because they matter to me and please don’t tell me that caring about other people out of a desire to do so is a form of selfishness, since if you use the word “selfishness” to mean “anything that one wants to do” it becomes meaningless.

And in response I can say that, in terms of Adam Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” my actions are guided/urged by Sympathy. It feels right to care for others and to contribute to community. Does this diminish me or take away from my nature or individual goals? I find that difficult to address.

It requires an understanding of what it means to be human in terms of negating community, or rather perverting the communal to a mere aggregate of individual wills. I simply do not find that to be the case. There is a sense of the communal that seeks “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (Marx)” such that it benefits everyone. There is an argument that such action can be reduced to a basic self-maximizing drive, that the communal strength can be co-opted by the individual to his/her benefit, but I do not think that detracts from the result of the communal project on its face.

“On the other hand, I believe that wealth and goods in the broadest sense of the word (healthcare,
education, balanced diet, recreation, clean environment) should be distributed as equally as possible among all human beings, taking into account varying needs and temperaments, without consideration for ability to pay.”

While I can certainly agree with the welfarist distributive justice sentiment and general feel good humanity and concern for my fellow human beings of this.

It is based on values and not facts. It is not an economic argument. It ignores production. The real on the grounds facts of how we produce goods and foods and services. It ignores the reality of how we produce electricity, mine, transport goods and food and who does these things and why.

If everyone “wealth and goods in the broadest sense of the word (healthcare,
education, balanced diet, recreation, clean environment) should be distributed as equally as possible among all human beings, taking into account varying needs and temperaments, without consideration for ability to pay” we will all starve to death.

If everyone gets everything as if by right, why would anyone work in the fields ? Or in a factory ? Or be a truck driver? Or a plumber? Be a doctor or a nurse? Or a teacher? Why would anyone go to work ?

If everyone stops working will we then have to by threat of force, incarceration, or death make them work?

And if people have a right to the product of the work of others haven’t the workers lost their rights and are slaves?

Dr. Jonas Salk didn’t need to make money from the polio vaccine because he made a lot of money as a doctor and researcher. So he had the luxury to sort of donate away the patent. Likewise it’s great when people give to charities or in their spare time provide or contribute some service or good or podcasts (thank you PEL!!!!!!!!!!).

The “countless other doctors, nurses, teachers” go to work to make money. They may also mean well and feel good about their job, but so should the truck driver that brings food to my local store so I don’t starve to death.

The same way things get done in my house (and probably yours): we cooperate; someone takes out the trash, another agrees to water the plants, another does the wash.

If people don’t cooperate, the system I propose would not work.

My point is not that people are going begin to cooperate with one another later this afternoon, but that in ethical terms, that is the best system: that it should be our goal, our ideal.

My criticism of Ayn Rand is an ethical one.

In concrete terms, in the present political situation I favor a mixed economy, with things like healthcare, oldage pensions, and education being public goods, available to all independent of their ability to pay and I leave most of the rest to the private sector. That’s not my ideal, but it’s a realistic compromise, in my opinion.

This is going to be a rehash much of a conversation I had with Tammy and dmf in the comment section of PEL post “Marxist Thought Today” so I’m going to repeat a lot of things but as we’re moving into economics questions it’s appropriate I guess.

In the podcast professor Heath talks about how communism as the attempt to do away with markets and prices etc. was a failure.

It doesn’t matter if you’re on the left or the right and want to change this or that policy, have more or less social programs, universal health care or not, you are still not getting away from capitalism.

We can see in Greece and Spain and etc. what happens when people forget this. The state can no longer redistribute what it doesn’t have. It is capitalism that makes the goods, services, and money the state can redistribute.

You’re not going to get away from markets and price systems. And even Soviet Union had to marketize the system to try to make it work and calculate prices. And it failed. That’s why China has given up on communism as an economic system.
And how even countries we might think of as socialist in Europe are actually capitalist countries.

In communism a “planned economy” the government regulates and dictates production. It owns every thing. It tells you what you can get or not. It regulates distribution. And it regulates labor, tells you what job you’re going to do for the good of society.

In a capitalist economy the labor market in a bottom up decentralized distributed net work way tells every one what jobs need to be done and how valuable those jobs are to society.

Matt Ridley: Deep Optimism (On this video you can got to 3 and skip the intros)(video and mp3)

In the Matt Ridley talk and his book he talks about the computer mouse and about one of the many things the capitalist market does that we take for granted that the soviet union figured out very quickly and had to marketize the system to try to make it work.
Besides the price systems it get people from around the world working together, and for each other, in a bottom up decentralized distributed net work way to get thousand or millions of people at different times and places doing different things and taking different ideas from different people and places that don’t even know each or know how to make a computer mouse.

So I’m a not here to say that capitalism is wonderful and great and fair or any thing like that. It’s not.
I could write books about the problems with it. (And especially about banking !!)

But it, the market, or “the invisible hand of the market”, does a lot of things we take for granted and think just happen. And the reason communism failed as an economic system is they realized you can’t do without prices and the market.
And the people didn’t like the government dictating every aspect of their lives.
And people like to have some say in politics such as who gets elected.

Even your household where everyone cooperates depends on capitalism for goods, food, and services. And the house itself.
Each is working with and for each other just like in capitalism. Even in a barter system without money with basic trade of goods or services it’s still capitalism. And there’s still a hierarchy and implied use of punishment or rewards and division of labor and value to the act being done, etc..

The ideal is a system based on cooperation, more or less like the libertarian socialism proposed by Chomsky.

That has little to do with communism, which entails a state-run economy, a one-party state, and a lack of political liberties.

I think that I made clear that if people are not willing to cooperate with one another, a system of cooperation is not viable. People cannot be forced to cooperate by the state.

No, a barter system is not capitalism. Not every market-economy is capitalist.
Marx sees capitalism as a system where the means of production are owned by capitalists and people sell their labor power in return for wages.

So, I can imagine a market system of individual producers or farmers that is not capitalistic.

However, in our current globalized world we are as far from a world of individual producers and farmers as we are from a world of cooperation.

If a world of individual producers and farmers is your utopia, we are as far from that as we are from my utopia, a world of cooperation.

Now my practical proposal is a mixed economy and it has elements of capitalism. I never denied that. In practical politics I’m a social democrat.

The crisis in Spain is not a crisis of the social-democratic welfare state. It’s a housing boom gone bust, much like the one in the U.S. in 2008. The banks lent too much money to the wrong people. The crisis in Greece is one of an ill-managed social democratic welfare state. Any system can be badly managed.

However, the social-democratic welfare state is alive and well in France and in the north of Europe. Yes, they’ve had to cut some programs, but the basic social rights still function.

I come from Chile. We are moving towards a system where healthcare and education are seen as rights that everyone has, regardless of the ability to pay.

I can agree with you on many points. I like some things about Ayn Rand and disagree with some other things. Actually you would probably agree with more of her ideas about individual rights. A free society. Women’s and minority rights immigration, women’s right to control their own reproduction, etc..

“No, a barter system is not capitalism. Not every market-economy is capitalist.
Marx sees capitalism as a system where the means of production are owned by capitalists and people sell their labor power in return for wages.”

That’s only partly true. Capitalism is a system of trade of an individual trading a value (good/service) for a value (good/service/) and it doesn’t matter if there’s money or not. If the state owns the business or not. You’re not getting to another system. You can change a lot of things about the system.

“I think that I made clear that if people are not willing to cooperate with one another, a system of cooperation is not viable.”

That really isn’t a different system you’re just removing money and making involvement voluntary. But what if no one volunteers to be a garbage man? Or if no one volunteers to work the fields? That’s hard work that most people in the U.S. probably not only don’t want to do but physically can’t do.

I think you have some thing in mind like in Star Trek once they create the replicator all needs can be easily met.

“So, I can imagine a market system of individual producers or farmers that is not capitalistic.”

No. You still have to determine the value of the good in relation to supply and demand. And the farmers still have their own bills to pay and so do the workers.
They have needs and so they have to get something in return goods/services.

This is what the Soviet Union found out, now I know you’re not advocating communism, but you’re not going to get away from some form of market system and some form of pricing system. Some form of capitalism trading value for value. Capitalism creating the values (goods,food, services). Capitalism as primary production, of an individual working to produce/create/make something and in turn trading it (good/service) to another individual for more things the individual needs. The market system.

I don’t force my views on anyone. I try to convince others using arguments and to set an example of cooperation and caring for others.

I admit that I don’t convince many people, but from time to time I influence someone.

I also vote in favor of candidates who have views similar to mine or whose views point in the same direction as I would like to go.

Why should I care about others more than about myself?

I’m not sure that caring about oneself and caring about others are mutually exclusive.

I don’t see caring about myself as having more money or having a bigger car or a newer computer.

Caring about myself means a minimum level of comfort, books to read (most of which I can get in the public library or free online), warm clothes in winter, assuring that I have the freedom to express myself, tasty, but fairly cheap food, a can of beer in the evening, healthcare, etc.

I think that the same goods could be made available to everyone, without my losing anything that matters to me.

I’m not in competition with others to have more things or to have bigger things or to have newer things.

Why have children? There is no rational basis for it. None. We should strive for our own immortality instead. I got here because I swam faster than the other sperm, so don’t expect me to thank anybody else for my existence. Like Howard Roark, I was born on page one, orphaned on shores of my own genius, with no emotional history whatsoever. Only suckers like Peter Keating are born of woman and have a past.

Why have a legislative branch of government or a President? There is no rational basis for it. The administration of justice can proceed according to immutable axioms that only need to be programmed properly and enforced. When people assemble to air grievances or organize in common cause or broker compromises among various interests and priorities … yuck. There’s not enough Purel in the world to make it worth it. Thankfully, the market has everything it needs to operate democracy for us.

Why continue scientific inquiry? I know what I know because I know it. Cigarettes are good for you and anyone who says otherwise is evading a life of the mind. Medicare is evil, but I’ll take it now that I’m dying of lung cancer. Love affairs are great until my mistress has one, too. And did I mention that contradiction is the worst thing ever? It is.

Am I the only person who thinks good things are good? Evidently.

And any time I doubt this … any time the bloodless void inside me tugs too sharp to bear … any time the wind and water refuse to make proper, geometric clouds (com-trails only, please!) … I can set up a Google Alert to pick a new fight and vent my certainties again.

Which brings me to my final why …

Why bother being an Objectivist Evangelist when I have nothing to gain from the exchange? There is no rational basis for it.

People deal by trade or they deal by force. Dealing by trade is capitalism. Every alternative to capitalism is some exploiting others by force. “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” is a prescription for a slave society, one in which the able and productive are compelled to serve those who are not able or productive.”

A. “mixed economy” is a mixture of force and voluntary cooperation.

Morally, a mixture of criminals and rights-respecting citizens.

This was Ayn Rand’s view.

The question to ask any socialist is why he isn’t just another thug.

Their most common answer-one way or another-is altruism.

They are forcing others to be “virtuous,” according to their morality.

And they’ve murdered something like 150 million people in the last 100 years.

While the dirty, evil, selfish, profit-driven capitalists have given us the prosperity of the modern world.

And a global lifespan that more than doubled between 1900 and 1985 (I’ve read).

please don’t bring up those stale, ingrown, patently false assertions that socialists have murdered millions. I suppose you are thinking of the soviet union and china principally, but anyone who knows even the most elementary facts about things like socialism know that no state has ever put socialism of any variety into effect. lenin deliberately destroyed the nascent socialist institutions during the bolshevik revolution for instance. lenin murdered socialism in the crib by getting rid of worker councils and so on, which makes sense because if you want absolute power you have to get rid of democratic control of both political and economic life, which lies at the core of socialism/anarchist political philosophy.

why can’t people learn history? the only mentionable socialist society in the modern era came out of the short-lived anarchist revolution in spain. it was crushed by the fascists of course, but while it lasted in catalonia industrial production actually increased, due to the fact that the workers cut out the inefficient system of managers and hierarchical control.

for a decent introduction to the revolution, read orwell’s homage to catalonia. better yet, get a copy of the AFAQ

Burke, I doubt you are a liar; you are most likely just ignorant, which is the case with pretty much everyone, especially in the united states.

My apology for seeming to go off the rails there. I was jumping back and forth replying to two very different arguments. Which is usually how Rand discussions go, there’s the “right” side that Rand is correct. And the “left” that is usually either an ad hominem against Rand personally or some moral/ethical argument. Which is why I’m looking to forward to the podcast.

Some of my obtuseness my come from trying to say Ayn Rand has some valid points while also personally disagreeing with much of her ideas. Which I very much argeed with Mark’s comment “Or have I missed the Objectivist tracts grappling charitably with Heidegger, Deleuze, and the like?”

I would have liked to have seen how the Spanish revolution would have turned out.

I certainly have some sympathies with/for “libertarian socialism” as some of it’s ideas are part of the Occupy movement. Of course this line of thinking has taken many forms such “Mutualism” some advocating getting rid of wages, etc.

It seems to me there might be some inherent contractions “libertarian socialism”, but I’ll have to do some more reading on that and think about it. So I don’t know.

I really didn’t know so I’ve been reading about this and thinking it through and I was rereading over the post and comments and found a typo of mine above I meant “contradiction” and not “contraction”.

But now that I’ve read more on this libertarian socialism and the Spanish revolution and Orwell’s account of it. Other accounts of the revolution are not so kind. It was brutal and they used force etc..
Orwell was a “left-libertarian” which is libertarian socialism. The ironic thing is although so many left-libertarians object to “right”-libertarians, in fact they are very similar. The difference being property rights. “Right” libertarians see the confiscation of property to be an attack/use of force on the person. Left libertarians do not and it is exactly this move that one would have to make to reconcile a doctrine like libertarianism with an ideology like socialism.
But it seems like an illegitimate move. Because to confiscate peoples businesses, homes, food, money there is the implied use of force and threat.
Left libertarians try to side step the moral responsibility by saying it’s “voluntary”.
But this doesn’t absolve one of moral responsibility to say a slave if free if he has Stockholm syndrome and loves the slave masters.
The right libertarians try side step moral responsibility by an equally invalid move of contra-causal free will.

Although libertarian socialism tries to avoid the mistakes of statism socialism/communism I don’t think it can avoid the same mistakes.

At some point people won’t volunteer to do certain jobs or even most jobs.
They want something in return, goods, service, food, money.
So then you have trade and markets wages and prices.

You can avoid human actions and motivations or incentives. It’s either the stick or the carrot.

It’s the stick, use of force in North Korea as it was in the Soviet Union or it’s the carrot that gets some one to put so much time, energy, and money into getting a degree and becoming a doctor, the promise of making money and having a decent life and providing for one’s family.

So I don’t think the Spanish revolution would have ended up any different than the Soviet Union that had to calculate prices and marketize the system or use force.
And many accounts of the Spanish revolution they resorted to force.

I said I didn’t know and I’d look into it and I did and it actually reinforces my argument I think

I hope for your own sake that that view doesn’t warp your social life or personal happiness.

As to the point about anarchist violence, the ones who murdered property owners were often ostracized by the more mature anarchists who knew violence begets violence and is only legitimate in self-defense. Killing property owners is a crime, I agree.

I would point out too however that capitalism was imposed by force and violence too, such as with the land enclosure acts and the extermination of natives to appease the gods of private property (we have locke to thank for that), so there is enough accusation to go around. I cannot appeal to the no true scotsman fallacy and neither can you.

Really? The fact that Hitler called himself a “national socialist” makes Nazism a genuinely socialist political philosophy!? I guess I should be fighting against the horrors of democracy too, because “The Peoples Democratic Republic of North Korea” proves that democracy is evil. Or, is it possible that, despite the name, North Korea isn’t actually all that democratic?

first of all, sorry to everybody reading these comments; i hope i did not stoke the fire of a shitstorm. In some ways it is inevitable since the topic itself, a person, is so incendiary.

this episode is about objectivist epistemology, the subject should not even turn to politics; I just had to respond to a particularly ripe comment.

Adam Y has already made the obvious correct response that just because someone calls themselves one thing does not make it so. For example, some anarcho-capitalists (who aren’t anarchists by any means incidentally) will tell you quite sincerely that the United States is not really capitalist; there may be an argument to have there. As for all the “socialist” dictatorships, they’re example of bald-face, embarrassingly unsophisticated propaganda such as with having the word “democratic” or “socialist” in the official name is exactly what got Orwel fired up.

The Nazis retained private property and believed in close cooperation between business and the state, elevating the wellness of the German “people” above all other considerations. In short, it was ultranationalist, which means racist, religiously intolerant garbage. Taken together, that doesn’t spell socialism.

I sparingly comment on PEL; the episodes are awesome, as this one will no doubt be.

I still got my fingers crossed for a Rorty episode since it is one of my main interests as a recent graduate! I have a love hate relationship with his thought and I rarely hear a sober conversation about it.

While Burke’s particular argument is tripe, for all the reasons you stated, from what little I know of the Randian perspective there seems a simpler way for the Objectivist to lump the Nazis with the Socialists.

If we simply draw the political line along the individualist/collectivist spectrum – ignoring the moral and economic mechanisms by which this is achieved – the they don’t sit far apart. From what I do understand of the Randian faith, any system that for even a moment considers that the individuals ends may need to take a back seat to the ends of the state is a collectivising one. If the needs of “society” take precedence over the needs of the individual…

Anyway, this is just me thinking out loud.

Burke’s argument is still tripe, but the identification he makes seems to sit comfortably with what I know of Rand’s view.

What’s more “basic” than “reality”? Does the fact that we use the term in more than one way change the fact that the concept “existence” (reality) is our most basic concept? What’s more basic? The word “case” has 23 different meanings in my computer dictionary. Many of our words are symbols for more than one thing.

And what could be more subjective than Kant’s notion that everything we think we know is just a creation of our mind and is not real? (his “phenomenal” world)

Burke, I found the Standford Encyclopedia article on Rand helpful in its distinction between “intrinsic” and “objective.” The former just has to do with the world in itself, apart from any human minds. The latter is a matter of the product of a mind and a world coming together to create/reveal (there really is no non-arbitrary difference between which word you choose in this context) what we call reality. Rand herself implicitly (according to the Stanford authors, who are big Rand supporters) makes this distinction, meaning that’s what “objective” means to her, and hence “reality,” yes, is basic, and as you pointed out, epistemologically involves a human component. Despite what you’ve been told by Rand and every other objectivist, this is also exactly Kant’s view. Rand, not caring about academic philosophy all that much more than you appear to, did not take the time to read and understand Kant or much post-Kantian philosophy, and thus is raging against a straw man.

I am aware, however, that she strongly distinguishes between the epistemological, in which context I’ve described her notion of “objective” above, and metaphysical, where she insists that the things we know are metaphysically as they appear to us, i.e. that they are intrinsically as we perceive them objectively. I’m claiming that she has no basis at all for making this leap other than wishful thinking. Proof is not available either way.

I think pre-philosophically, we think of “reality” as referring to the intrinsic. So if despite the complete absence of evidence in our experience, the world were to turn out to be just the mind of God or the Matrix or what have you, we would want to say that that’s reality, and our experienced world is an illusion.

It was a substantial advance in the history of philosophy (by the post-Kantians like Hegel and Nietzsche and the pragmatists) to say “hey, let’s stop worrying about the intrinsic and just call the experienced world ‘reality,’ which is of course what everyone thought before philosophers came along and started casting doubt on things.” But in making that move, they essentially abandoned metaphysics altogether (and so stopped making pronouncements on religious matters, for one) or else started doing other things in its place like “phenomenological ontology,” which is about talking about the structures of experience or linguistic analysis, which examines (for example) the logic of phrases like necessity and possibility (so if you read about philosophers talking about possible worlds, they’re probably not making literal pronouncements about such weird things but merely trying to get clearer about the logical entailments of certain phrases).

The stomach analogy is irrelevant; digestion isn’t about revealing truth.

You ask “what’s the justification for Kant’s claim that our senses don’t give us the actual facts of reality?”

I answer that Kant is not claiming this; he’s claiming that if you take reality to mean intrinsic, then we just aren’t in a position to know whether the data of our senses corresponds to the world in-itself or not.

You ask “what could be more subjective than Kant’s notion that everything we think we know is just a creation of our mind?”

Subjectivism would be where everyone’s mind is different and so we all perceive a different reality, or even worse, if we could by an act of will change our minds so that then reality would change for us individually. This is not Kant’s view. Kant thinks we all have the same faculties, the same perceptual apparatus, and so we all perceive the same, objective, phenomenal world. Idealism is not the same thing as subjectivism: the earlier idealist Berkeley was the guy that thought that the perceived world is really the mind of God, but given that God is external to any one of us individually, that would be enough to make the world objective, even though he would judge matter to be not ultimately real. Epistemic objectivism is not sufficient for metaphysical realism.

I’m guessing you’re just not going to accept that the Randian interpretation of Kant is incorrect, despite the fact that absolutely no Kant scholar would judge it to be remotely on the mark.

What’s the justification for Kant’s claim that our senses don’t give us the actual facts of reality?

Because it’s processed knowledge and distorted by the process?

What’s the basis for that claim?

Our senses are just physical entities responding to physical stimuli according to the deterministic laws of nature. Why would they act in any way contrary to their nature? As Ayn Rand pointed out, does the fact that our stomachs process the food we eat mean that we aren’t getting “true” nutrition?

Then why would the fact that we process the sensory input mean that we are not getting true percepts?

Kant is claiming that we are blind because we have eyes, that we are unable to perceive reality because our means of perception is real and has an identity.

He’s claiming that we don’t have a means of perception because we do have a means of perception.

Thank’s for your thoughtful responses. But I have to say that Kant was repulsing me before I ever heard of Ayn Rand. His ideas permeate our culture, and I could recognize them in her criticisms later as well as in what I had read of his works.

My advice to you and everyone is not to try to learn Objectivism by reading ABOUT it, not even by reading the works of Objectivist scholars, at least not initially. Read Ayn Rand’s works themselves. I’ve been telling people this for half a century. It’s the best advice I can give.

My view and the view of many experienced Objectivists is that Ayn Rand is Aristotle’s modern-day successor. She took his basic objective, rational, scientific approach and ran with it as no one else ever has. And, contrary to what you think, she did build her philosophy from the ground up.

You are not going to get it stumbling around the Internet and reading the evaluations of people who know little or nothing about her ideas themselves. They are nearly all evaluating her ideas through the prism of modern philosophers almost all of whom are little more than secular mystics, IMO.

Kant himself wrote that he had to give up reason in order to keep his religious faith. Everything he wrote was an attack on life and its means of existence: reason.

There is one way, however, that you can get a quick Objectivist view on many subjects, here:

Per my original post, I have been reading Rand texts for the last month or so: ITOE (read originally in college, then reread for this episode, then went back and took notes on it), Virtue of Selfishness (also originally read in college in full, read maybe 6 of the essays this time around, two of them with some care), plus the Fountainhead, plus listened to 20+ Peikoff episodes and have read bits of Atlas Shrugged and sat through almost the whole first movie (also started Anthem but just couldn’t take it and suspected that I wouldn’t be getting any substance there that wasn’t already in the Fountainhead). So what you’re seeing here is my considered take on the ideas as presented in the original texts, and the arguments like the digestion one you’re giving are all ones that I’ve already read and am reacting to. Of course I could spend my life on it and be able to more readily recite chapter and verse what the Randian view is on this or that, but I don’t read philosophy for that reason: I read different thinkers from a variety of stripes in order to develop my own thoughts.

I recommended the Stanford article to supplement what you already know about Rand, because there are folks that have actually studied the history of philosophy and are familiar with current debates (which Rand really didn’t have a lot of time for), which really does put them in a better position to understand and evaluate Rand’s texts than someone who just reads Rand and Peikoff and their self-identified disciples. Just my opinion, of course.

So I’ve gone to the Rand well, multiple times, to see what the hubbub was about, and I challenge you to spend some serious time foraging beyond your comfort zone. Start with ep. 58-59 (see http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/podcast-episodes/) on a few modern approaches to ethics, much of which is spent on Alasdair MacIntyre, another Aristotelian. Actively try to see if you can get anything illuminating out of it. Rand is not the only game in town, I promise.

“I am aware, however, that she strongly distinguishes between the epistemological, in which context I’ve described her notion of “objective” above, and metaphysical, where she insists that the things we know are metaphysically as they appear to us, i.e. that they are intrinsically as we perceive them objectively. I’m claiming that she has no basis at all for making this leap other than wishful thinking. Proof is not available either way.”

What is proof? How do we prove things?

Ayn Rand wrote that the foundation of our knowledge is the evidence of our senses. Everything else we know is built from that.

That being the case, all proof reduces to the perceptually given.

So what does it mean to demand that one prove that our senses give us truthful knowledge?

It means that you don’t understand that you are engaging in the fallacy of the stolen concept (by implication). That is, engaging in a contradiction.

And it means that you don’t understand that concepts are hierarchical in nature.

Or that the fact that our senses give us truth is self-evident.

Or that to deny that means you are also engaging in a contradiction.

And that there are no contradictions in nature.

You need a much broader understanding of Ayn Rand’s philosophy than anyone can give you on an Internet message board.

There is a reason Ayn Rand’s ideas are enduring and, today, exploding. There is a reason you have posters badgering you about her philosophy.

For over 2000 years, the history of philosophy has been a conflict between the predominantly rational approach of Aristotle and a gaggle of mystics and sophists.

Ayn Rand has taken Aristotle’s basic laws of logic and completed what he started.

Our senses tell us that matter is solid. Physicists have discovered that matter is mostly empty space. Were the senses wrong? Well, yes and no. It’s more that “solid,” the word we picked to describe the behavior of the kind of matter that doesn’t yield to moderate amounts of pressure (unlike liquid or gas) had a more limited applicability than we thought; what seems solid to us wouldn’t seem solid to us if we were very very small.

For this example, objectivism has a reasonable response: “solid” was a concept based on our experience, and if we find out that a “solid” behaves in certain ways that we wouldn’t expect a solid to act (e.g. it lets radioactive particles through), then that’s just a new fact we learn about solids and doesn’t negate the truth of particular identifications we might have made in the past that this or that object is solid.

But what about time? The experienced world is temporal, but this raises some problems, such as, does time stretch infinitely in both directions (Rand for one doesn’t believe in actual infinities), or does it stop at some point (also unacceptable for Rand, for one because everything in the experienced world, i.e. reality according to Rand, is caused, and such a beginning would by necessity be uncaused)? One common proposed historical solution (I think Kant bought into this) is that time is somehow illusory, that its appearance as a stream stretching in both directions is misleading. This would take some work to coherently lay out, and I’ve not read much in this area, so I’ll let the details pass. The point is that on such a view, our senses are deceiving us in a significant way.

This case is a little less readily describable by aspectualism, which is a general class that I think Rand’s view falls under. We couldn’t, if this is correct, maintain that what we normally experience is “reality” and that this physics-eye non-temporal view is just an aspect of reality in the same way that the molecular description is a different aspect. Why? Because the apparent reality leads to an apparent contradiction re. the origin of time. As you said, nature itself doesn’t have contradictions in it, so what reality is must be something of a different character than the experienced world.

Discovering the limits of a faculty is not the same thing as denying the legitimacy of the faculty in any arena. Nothing about the above would imply that the senses don’t serve perfectly well for most purposes, but we can’t say for sure that it even serves all HUMAN purposes, or all purposes relevant to survival, as when sensorily undetectable radiation ends up killing us.

Evidence likewise is a concept invented within a certain context, and it works for that context. The temporal origin of the universe is one such apparent limit (not that this should stop scientists from trying to work back as far as they can), and the Kantian Thing-In-Itself is (allegedly) another such limit, built right there into the structure of our relation to the world.

Of course, if someone were to take this situation and argue from it that “anything goes,” or that we have (or need) a mystical faculty to reach the realm beyond experience, that person would be full of crap. Nothing about this view implies mysticism, undermines the pursuit of science, or “denies reality” in a psychologically objectionable way. On the contrary, this is an attempt to understand reality, which as scientific history reveals, has in many cases revealed that the percepts revealed in our experience are not as they appear. (World is flat, anyone?)

The purpose of concept formation is to reduce the vast amount of (certain) perceptual knowledge we acquire to perceptual concretes (words) that we can grasp mentally. If you understood ITOE, you would know that the discovery of the atomic structure of a solid didn’t contradict our knowledge of solids. It extended it.

(As an aside, I would say that Einstein’s relativity didnt contradict or disprove Newton. It merely extended Newton’s knowledge. But Ayn Rand never addressed induction.)

If you understood ITOE, you would know that the discovery of the atomic structure of a solid didn’t contradict our knowledge of solids. It extended it.

Compare this to what Mark wrote regarding atomic structure, ie. that “objectivism has a reasonable response”, going on to say

then that’s just a new fact we learn about solids and doesn’t negate the truth of particular identifications we might have made in the past that this or that object is solid.

Maybe you should have read a little more closely what Mark wrote, as it seems that you are in agreement about what Objectivism might say. Indeed, if you were to genuinely engage instead of simply spamming this forum you might learn something. I won’t hold my breath.

I’m aware of what Rand said about the atomic case, but think for yourself for a minute. Whether or not we say a new discovery simply extends or actually undermines the pre-scientific view is a matter of the character of the particular discovery.

It’s difficult to make this point w/o bringing in science fiction examples, because of course we’re already in the intellectual aftermath of past discoveries and can’t really picture how they affected individuals’ world-views. So imagine that we discovered that all seemingly inorganic matter in fact was alive, had inner lives, felt pain even. Yes, you could call this simply an extension of current knowledge to a new aspect. But given what a fundamental transformation in our behavior this would call for, I’d want say that the past alleged knowledge was actually undermined.

The first thing of great philosophical significance that I learned from Ayn Rand long ago was the fact that A is A (The Law of Identity) and that A is not non-A (Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction). For Ayn Rand, these axioms along with the fact of consciousness, are truths that cannot be denied without admitting them in the course of attempting to deny them. For her, axioms are not basic truths from which other truths are derived. They are basic truths that cannot denied, “anchors to reality.” She wrote that existence is identity, consciousness is identification, and logic is the art (or skill) of non-contradictory identification.

For Ayn Rand, the growth of knowledge was a constant integration of (certain) perceptual knowledge and concepts into the body of knowledge one already possesses without engaging in contradictions, that is, without violating the law of identity.

This is my basic approach to any study. When one expects or demands that I accept contradictions, I quickly lose interest.

And really, any claim to know that man can know nothing with certainty is such a contradiction.

It’s like claiming that a chair is not a chair.

There are no such critters.

It’s really nothing but mysticism.

Life is too short to waste laboring over the irrational texts of skeptics claiming to know that man can really know nothing.

Exhibit A: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, most of which is incomprehensible gibberish. And that which is comprehensible is largely just the ravings of a man attempting to claim that perception is not perception because it’s perception.

When “A=A” is brandished, that’s a sure sign that there’s a straw man afoot.

No one denies the law of non-contradiction. Certainly not Kant.

What folks deny us that something that you allege to be a contradiction really is one.

The claim that sense perception yields knowledge only within limits is not a paradox.

The claim that any particular, single sense perception may be a mis-identification is not a paradox.

The claim that sense perception may be systematically warped is not a paradox, and the reasoning used to admit this possibility is not simply sense perception itself but an abstraction from particular known cases of errors.

I start running. The intention and action of running definitionally implies fast movement. But, hey, I find after running a while that need to stop; I’m tired. The very act of running, by a person, implies that running must stop eventually.

Paradox!

Well, no, and neither does using sense perception to determine that sense perception has limits, that just as attempting to run straight ahead result in only a relatively small amount of ground covered, such that compared to the available ground, the amount covered is practically nil, the amount of reality available to sense perception may be much much smaller than the amount just not available.

I’m not saying skepticism is true. I’m saying it’s not a logical absurdity.

Here’s a logical fact about contradictions: from them you can prove ANYTHING.

Premise 1. A and not A
From this it follows A
And also from 1, it follows not A
From A, it follows A or B
From A or B and not A, it follows B

…and of course B can be any statement, including another self-contradictory one.

So if you claim that any of my statements are paradoxes, ie that they rely on implicit premises that contradict the stated conclusion, I invite you to demonstrate the paradox by deriving the statement “Burke is not at all confused.” 🙂

Phenomenal the way Kant uses the term does not equal unreal. He’s not saying we’re blind.

He’s making a distinction more between the physical and the metaphysical. To say that we’re blind to the metaphysical was a claim he made to put a lot of crazy ass metaphysicians like Plato in their places, to keep them from making unwarranted claims.

The Critique is largely negative. Though one can try to sneak behind the phenomenal veil with some alleged other mode of knowledge (this is actually how Kant tried to argue for free will), a more consistent position is just to shut up about metaphysics altogether after the exercise.

“Phenomenal the way Kant uses the term does not equal unreal. He’s not saying we’re blind.”

I’m sure that’s what he would like people to think in order to try to get away with his contradiction, but there is only the real world, the “world as it is.”

Let’s say some scientists want to test a subject to see if his senses give him real knowledge. You know that the scientists will have to use their own senses to conduct the tests. How do they know whose senses are correct in the event of a conflict (which I would say is impossible), theirs or those of the test subject?

What is the implication of the claim that man can know nothing “with certainty”?

I would say that it means man can really KNOW nothing, because he would have no way of knowing when his senses were failing him.

And if he can know nothing, is he even conscious?

Is it possible for an unconscious man to know anything?

Of course not.

The fact that we are conscious is axiomatic. Any attempt to deny that involves a contradiction, one claiming to be both conscious and unconscious.

What could Kant have perceived that led him to conclude that he cannot perceive the real world? As with the scientists.

Something unreal?

Come on!

Man is capable of absolute certainty at the perceptual level.

Because A is A and not non-A.

The interesting stuff really starts at the level of conceptual knowledge.

And, since similarity is perceived directly in the formation of concepts, integrations of existents into concepts can be done with certainty.

“What is the implication of the claim that man can know nothing “with certainty”?

I would say that it means man can really KNOW nothing, because he would have no way of knowing when his senses were failing him.”

No, the quest for certainty is an adolescent one. All we need is warrant, which we get through the usual way. Unless you have a reason to doubt a specific perception, when contemplating a particular action, then that’s plenty reason to proceed.

Consciousness is awareness of reality. Either you have that ability or you don’t. If you don’t, you aren’t conscious. One can be uncertain of some things, but that’s not the issue. The skeptics claim that we can be certain of nothing. If we can be certain of nothing, I say we know nothing. And if we know nothing, we are not conscious.

“What could Kant have perceived that led him to conclude that he cannot perceive the real world?”

You already know this one. The skeptic looks at ordinary cases of mistakes, of thinking one thing then discovering he was wrong and asks “how can I rule out the possibility that something like this is happening all the time?” That’s different from making a positive claim that such a distortion really is happening.

You’re still focusing on the negative part of Kant’s Critique. He’s actually responding to the skeptic, saying “whatever reality would look like to an omniscient being, the phenomenal realm is relatively consistent, hardy, and all we need for robust science.”

“How did the skeptic discover he was mistaken if he can never know what is right?”

You’re the one denying knowledge. I’m denying certainty. Not the same thing. It would be ironic if every time I corrected my knowledge, e.g. I see a mirage of water and then get closer and realize there’s no water there, that there really was water that rapidly went away all of a sudden. Still, as that’s pretty unlikely, those mirage-then-correction experiences are all we need.

A few bits to clear up for anyone still paying attention now that I’m back on my PC (was writing on my phone for some of the above):

The place I differ from Kant (and yes, if you study someone, and you’re thinking about what they’re saying, and reading differing opinions and taking those seriously too, you will inevitably have your own opinions that differ from your predecessors) is that he draws this line between the phenomenal and the noumenal. This can’t be a metaphysical line, because by definition the noumenal is that about which no metaphysical claims can with epistemic warrant be made. And actually, one wouldn’t make “metaphysical” claims about the phenomenal realm either, because ordinary scientific claims are perfectly adequate for that realm; no metaphysics ends up being needed or possible. (Again, Kant himself in his other works is shifty about this, and Schopenhauer for one followed Kant’s epistemology very closely but then was all about making substantial claims about the noumenal, how it was all “Will” and all that.)

The line between them is an epistemic one, and is the same, as I said, as the one between the objective (phenomenal) and intrinsic (noumenal) implicit in Rand’s epistemology. That’s part of what’s so funny/ironic about Rand’s rabid anti-Kantianism. She just didn’t get it; but hey, she didn’t have the Internet where you can readily get informed about such things… modern Randians have no such excuse.

So personally, I don’t see a reason to depict this difference between those things amenable right now to scientific observation and those that aren’t (and just a side note, there are plenty of phenomena within the phenomenal realm that aren’t so amenable to scientific observation either, like, say, most of what the social sciences study, but that’s not what I’m talking about here) as two different realms, because that would imply a border between them, whereas by definition we wouldn’t ever be aware of the noumenal side of the border. So as far as we’re concerned, the phenomenal realm seems unbounded, which doesn’t mean we can see all of it, but just that we don’t really know what the limits of science to explore the physical realm are. Instead, I find it more helpful to proceed as I was in this earlier comment (http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2013/06/14/topic78-ayn-rand/comment-page-1/#comment-467306) when I was considering successive cases of weirdness that science could eventually discover, or alternately weirdness that could for all we know be the case, and we’d by nature never know about it. Maybe the whole universe is in a pimple on God’s ass. That kind of thing.

We use goofy sci-fi scenarios in philosophy to figure out what it is that we really do know, and I claim that even if we were in a God-ass pimple, that wouldn’t make my observation of the chair in front of me any less warranted. Kant didn’t figure out that what we thought was real really wasn’t, but that saying something is “real” is ambiguous: is it a physical claim, in which case it can be warranted, or a metaphysical claim, in which case it can’t? Instead of types, I prefer talking about degrees and contexts, and think that the term “real” has been defined (as Rand thinks!) in contexts having to do with ordinary observation, but that as you consider successive degrees of mistakenness, then our concept of “real” isn’t sufficiently defined to tell us one way or the other whether our original judgment of “this that I perceive is real” was true or not given the new freaky underlying facts we’ve just uncovered. Rand will insist that even if after contemplating a chair in front of us we discovered that we were all part of a God ass-pimple (I guess one of us would have to invent a macroscope or something, or look at the patterns of the stars) that we still had, with certainty, knowledge of the chair, whereas I think that’s a somewhat arbitrary judgment call.

Your last sentence there about certainty exposed what’s really at stake here, which is what makes this all so silly. Neither of us thinks there’s any real dispute about the scientific facts (you can defame Kantians and say there is, but that’s because you don’t know your Kant, and I would in fact encourage that you read good digests of him on the Internet–by real Kant scholars, not Objectivists, although our Kant episodes will serve as a fine re-introduction to him for you–because the original texts are maddeningly difficult as you remarked.). The issue here is that Objectivists want to be able to feel all certain about themselves so that they can then go on to claim certainty about ethics and politics and aesthetics, whereas the rest of us want to actually face the reality of our epistemic situation: that you can be warranted enough for all sorts of purposes, but that you can never have certainty. You see uncertainty as lack of self-confidence and the philosophers promoting it as trying to degrade Man, whereas I see this as a matter of being a grown-up who doesn’t need to cling to certainty to stand on his own two feet. Objectivists in this psychological respect are just as bad off as many religious folks, even though their epistemic errors are not nearly as egregious and, in their pursuit of rational justification over superstition, their heart is in the right place.

The positive for me is that I have been somewhat inspired and I am now going to go back and try reading Kant again. If I am being honest, I only really skimmed the Prolegomena. I was trying to be more attentive with The Critique, but got stuck on/frustrated with a few arguments and sort of lost the will.

Nothing is more real than the law of identity, and dreaming up different “realities” is just a way of getting around that, a way of having your cake and eating it, too.

A way of embracing contradictions.

Ayn Rand may have been the greatest proponent ever of the idea that philosophy is not only important but crucial. It drives individuals and, therefore, cultures (roughly) the same way programs drive computers. The main difference is that she believed that men have free will and can essentially program themselves.

Which is more important, “having a philosophy” or “having critical thinking skills?” I think the latter is a much more protection from the dangers of tyrants, advertisers, charismatic dogmatists, temptations to self-destructive behavior, and cults.

One of the things I liked that Peikoff said on his podcast (and I’m not going to remember his exact wording or which episode this was, but it was an early one) was that philosophy provides only general philosophical principles and does not dictate one’s attitudes towards specific concretes.

So we’re always going to need phronesis (practical wisdom; Aristotle’s word) to apply a philosophy. No amount of memorization of talking points is going to replace that. A readiness to impute irrational motives to anyone who disagrees with you does not demonstrate such wisdom. Only by trying to learn enough to get in their shoes so to speak can you expand your mind. Rand is not the only genius on offer, and I can guarantee that no one who’s already an adherent of objectivism is going to get a damn thing out of our discussion of it; all you’re going to do is get incensed by what you’ll see as our inadequate reading of it, given that I was the one of the four who immersed himself furthest.

So I highly advise you NOT to listen to that episode, or that you don’t do so until you’ve listened to virtually every other episode here (links to them are at http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/podcast-episodes/). It’ll just get you righteously indignant, which will help neither you nor anyone else. Good episodes to start with for you might be the two early Wittgenstein ones (7 & 8), then eps 66-68 on Quine, Carnap, and an interview with David Chalmers, who discusses different systems of scrutability, which would include Rand’s foundationalism (I wasn’t trying to argue that she thinks empirical facts are derivable from the fundamental axioms, but that all conceptual truths including the fundamental axioms are ultimately derivable from empirical observations). We’ve also done quite a lot of work on ethics, including a couple of Aristotle ones (on ethics and politics; the latter I think is a crucial antidote to Rand’s), one on Nietzsche, an interview with Owen Flanagan on different eudaimonistic systems (his book that we were talking to him about was actually on Buddhism, but he spends lots of time comparing its idea of virtue to that of Aristotle), and the aforementioned sequence (58-59) on modern ethics including both C.L. Stevenson’s emotivism, which really does (unlike Kant or utilitarianism, etc.) approximate the kind of subjectivism that Rand objects to (actually, Stevenson thinks there are no moral facts–subjective or otherwise, just moral expressions, so it’s not quite subjectivism) and MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelianism that is meant to reground morality in human teleology. We’ve also done some historical ethics (http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/podcast-topics/#ethics).

Interestingly, no where in the history of philosophy that we saw fit to cover (in trying to cover all the historically important positions) do you actually see “altruism” as one of the options. Yet another straw man from the objectivist camp. Rand seems to have had the equivalent of a couple of college intro courses and didn’t like those bleeding hearts and scummy beatniks and commies in her cultural milieu and somehow thought forming a philosophy in counter-reaction to that constituted enough of a survey of the wisdom of the ages to suit her purposes. To each her own, I guess, but it’s not a recipe for phronesis by my lights.

I’m going to have to let y’all have the last word on this. I need to get busy and use my philosophy brain-time to read another 70 pages or so about Heraclitus by Saturday when we’re next scheduled to record. I had decided in advance not to get sucked in to any kind of debate with Google-alert objectivists who already think they know enough and need not listen to anyone outside their camp, but getting into the scuffle a bit can be a nice challenge to articulate yourself.

“Which is more important, “having a philosophy” or “having critical thinking skills?”

A philosophy is an integrated view of existence (properly) acquired with ones’ thinking skills. And, ideally, without contradictions.

As for Peokoff’s remarks, I think of a philosophical principle as something like Einstein’s theory of relativity. It’s discovery made nuclear power possible, but Einstein himself did not have the specialized knowledge to build reactors or the Bomb. Others did that with the benefit of Einstein’s discovery. Ayn Rand herself cautioned against making great leaps from broad principles to specifics without the necessary knowledge or skills to do so.

Kant was the biggest purveyor of altruism in its ugliest form in history among philosophers, although he did not give it its name. Ayn Rand was born and educated in Russia long before there were any beatniks, etc.

And we Google Alert Objectivists are always up for a philosophical “scuffle.”

“Which is more important, “having a philosophy” or “having critical thinking skills?” I think the latter is a much more protection from the dangers of tyrants, advertisers, charismatic dogmatists, temptations to self-destructive behavior, and cults.”

I’m not a professional philosopher. I’m a lawyer, what Ayn Rand referred to as a “businessman intellectual.” I am aware of how difficult it is to read original texts and how much of it there is. But I am passionate, and I’ve been at this since I was a teenager in the ’50’s.

My approach has always been to address the ideas directly.

Looking back, it is surprising to me how much of Ayn Rand’s philosophy I had derived for myself before I really got into it. But she was the genius that filled the blanks and fully developed these ideas.

As you can see, I like to argue. And I don’t let people get away with telling me to go read this or that, especially when the argument tends to be an attempt to rationally prove that there is no such thing as reason.

You may as well be telling me to go read the Bible, as far as I’m concerned.

If you want to tangle with professional Objectivist philosophers, ones who have studied the original works, etc., there are quite a few out there. One already posted here.

Burke, you do realize that — while you apparently “don’t let people get away with telling you to go read this or that” — this has been your very response to anyone who finds fault with Rand’s arguments. You either accuse them of not having read the text(s), or, failing that, you accuse them of not reading the text(s) well enough to have understood them.

Trying to have it both ways like this, and acting as though you and your cohort alone have privileged access to truth, makes you appear more religious than you may care to admit.

The topic of this discussion is Ayn Rand’s philosophy and what she believed. I know that there is much misinformation out there. And I don’t expect anyone to just take my word as an authority. No one here knows me. I can tell that Mark has not read nearly enough to discuss her ideas adequately. He has not even read Atlas Shrugged, her magnum opus. This is not a criticism, as I think he has done a credible job of relating a few of her ideas. But there is so much there. It, therefore, is Incumbent upon me to suggest that.

But when we get into arguments about specific issues, I’m the one making the argument even though I got most of it from Ayn Rand. (I might add that she got some of what I was arguing from Arostotle.) And I’m not telling people to just go read this or that as my only real response.

Actually, “Ayn Rand’s philosophy and what she believed” is only part of the discussion. And it’s only a part of the discussion because of the way you chose to frame it.

When you:

1. suggest that all (non-Randian) “modern philosophy” is some version of Kantian idealism (which is demonstrably false to anyone with access to Wikipedia), and then
2. accuse Kant of being not simply wrong but silly, and then
3. criticize Kant with propositions that make clear you never really understood Kant’s arguments, while also
4. admitting that you never really read Kant (and didn’t need to), and finally
5. refuse to take the advice you give so freely to others (say, consider reading more by or about Kant, before deciding it’s not just wrong but nuts)…

…it rather gives the lie to your assertion that anyone who disagrees with Rand simply hasn’t read enough Rand. Thus, your argument in favor of Rand — if it is in fact an argument — fails.

I’ve never suggested that all modern philosophy is Kantian idealism, albeit Kant appears to be a dominating force. And I’ve never stated that I’ve never read any of Kant’s works. I’ve had a copy of his “Critique” in my house for decades and studied him in college. As I’ve stated, his ideas are everywhere and permeate the Western World.

Philosophy is not the study of philosophers. It’s the study of IDEAS.

And, frankly, most of Kant’s ideas are utter nonsense and gibberish to anyone who understands and accepts the basics of Aristotle’s logic.

I don’t have to read everything anyone ever wrote about the Problem of Universals or the Problem of Induction to address the question myself.

Not anymore than a scientist needs to read everything every other scientist ever wrote to conduct research.

If someone knows of an argument, say, Descartes made and wants to use it in an argument with me about Ayn Rand’s ideas, fine.

But don’t tell me to go read Descartes.

Especially, when you openly admit you are a skeptic who claims he can really know nothing with certainty.

1) Ayn Rand speaks truth
2)There are no contradictions in nature
3) The fact that our senses give us facts of reality is self-evident
4) “Consciousness is the faculty of awareness—the faculty of perceiving that which exists
5) Ayn Rand wrote that the foundation of our knowledge is the evidence of our senses
6) A is A (The Law of Identity) and that A is not non-A (Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction).
7) For her, axioms are not basic truths from which other truths are derived. They are basic truths that cannot denied, “anchors to reality.” She wrote that existence is identity, consciousness is identification, and logic is the art (or skill) of non-contradictory identification.
8)since similarity is perceived directly in the formation of concepts, integrations of existents into concepts can be done with certainty.

These assertions might be summarized as a form of rationalism based on concatenating concepts of logic built on one another, with a superimposition of the definition of existence . ((A is A) is not non-A) and are dogmatically asserted to be true (no further questioning possible or contradiction is claimed). The turtle holding up the world is that “Truth exists.”/”I define truth as identity which my consciousness identifies directly and logically through my senses which are necessarily logical, true and certain as well.”/”Everything not included in the tautology above is by definition contradiction.”

This seems mostly like a series of assertions embedded in the brute logic of A/Not A, so that any response is automatically rejected, not as a mere logical contradiction, but as contradictory to the self-asserted system. I could imagine setting up several such systems where the flip of the coin (heads-I-win/tails-you-lose) prevails, The fun one would be the inverse of Burke’s points.

I’m sorry Burke, but I just do not know how to respect a rigged rationalism supported by mere assertions.
And I am no Lawyer, nor Philosopher.

Burke:
I think that was Mark’s point. You are mistaking reasoning as rationalism and argument as philosophy. What you deny as valid makes understanding the valid impossible, the stuff after Points 1-8, as well as most of philosophy. Regards, Wayne.

But in the way that they are used by Objectivists they are simply one in a series of assertions – the objectivist dogma. They are little tautologies that are used to lend credence to the surrounding assertions. If you question the assertions then the objectivist strawmans you and claims that you are rejecting these basic principles of logic.

They are one of the convenient ways objectivists have of avoiding the examination of their assertions.

1) As Rand is deemed, for all intents and puproses, inerrant.
2) A is A, and A v -A are axiomatic to Rands system.
3) To reject, or merely question Rand is, by transference, to reject (2).

State A is A and entertain no further questions.

Much like the whole sceptic attack, or the Kant denied reality bizzo, or Kant was responsible for Nazism yada yada, it is a stock Objectivist response in order to evade any question.

One really should not judge an author by their disciples. But sometimes…

I actually enjoy Ayn Rand’s novels, and never knew there was an Objectivist (boy does that have a new meaning for me now) philosophy to contend with (thanks to Mark and Burke for pointing that one out, I think. Yikes–time to duck in the pews).

Rand is not a feature of the cultural landscape in Australia. The first I heard of her was references in the Simpsons. Being unfamiliar with her they didn’t really register.

My exposure to her ideas has been primarily provided by some of her more ardent proponents. This has not motivated me to engage with her stuff. Quite the opposite. And it is not as if there isn’t plenty to be getting on with. Kant came to work with me on the train this morning 🙂

Burke, I think what Wayne was suggesting (and what Mark was trying to explain in detail) is that your interpretation of the “law of identity” and the “law of non-contradiction” is dogmatic. No one is challenging “A = A” as such, just the conclusions you seem to have drawn from those premises.

You can’t just wave “A = A!” around, and expect that — without more — to support your assertions that everything Ayn Rand wrote is undeniably correct. Furthermore, you’re simply talking past people if you think that all people who disagree with you (and/or Rand) are also disagreeing with “A = A”. For example, Hegel was at least as well read as you (or Ayn Rand) on Aristotelian logic, and yet he came to very different conclusions.

Furthermore, logical argument didn’t begin with Aristotle and end with Rand. Real logic (mathematical logic) as it is used in any meaningful way today, stems from Boole and Frege, not Aristotle. And neither Frege nor his progeny came up with philosophies that looked anything like Rand’s. Thus, you can’t well demonstrate that the pure application of logical principles will lead you to Rand’s conclusions.

Again, I’d recommend that you follow your own advice, and consider actually reading more about these “modern philosophers” you so readily dismiss, before concluding that they have nothing to offer. I’m not saying you will conclude Rand is wrong after better educating yourself on the history of Western thought…but you might learn to offer better arguments in her defense. If you’re unwilling to do that, then you might want to at least recognize the impotence of your suggestion that Rand’s critics simply haven’t read her, or haven’t read enough of her, or haven’t worked hard enough to understand her after they did read her.

As I stated, I’m a businessman intellectual, not a professional philosopher, but I’m not exactly a baby at this. I’ve spent more than half a century arguing ideas. Probably, I was doing it before some of you were born. I had teachers in high school in the middle ’50’s giving me books on philosophy to read because I was I was interested in it. In 1959, a friend in college, a philosophy major, tossed me Atlas Shrugged to read. Today, he dislikes even discussing modern philosophy because it was so frustrating for him, leading to dead ends.

I’ve perused your site some. The loosey-goosey, non-serious stuff is a turnoff for me, although I appreciate your tolerant approach. But for me, ideas are crucial and not something to treat lightly.

Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. I approach every idea looking for contradictions. I agree with Ayn Rand that contradictions do not exist in nature, and I plainly appreciate that more than any of you.

Not one of you has written anything of substance that I haven’t heard in one form or another elsewhere. Responding to Mark’s arguments was easy. I could anticipate them, even.

If you think some philosopher has an idea that is important, YOU explain it.

I chose not to become a professional philosopher because nearly all modern philosophy is complete nonsense. After hearing that I have to get it from God as a child, I went to getting “it’s all subjective” from people in college.

I prefer “existence exists, things are what they are, and man is conscious of the world around him.”

Every attempt to deny that involves a silly contradiction and is little more than secular mysticism.

So don’t bother telling me to go read so and so. If you can’t explain it, it’s almost certainly more of the BS of the ages.

I’ve not been keeping up with comments here, but I’m pretty sure I gave a list of things that someone sympathetic to objectivism might want to LISTEN TO, not read, i.e. it actually is me and some other guys explaining it. This being the site for a podcast, catering to people interest in philosophy (99% of whom are not professional philosophers), that seemed apt. Take it or leave it. So long!

Burke, I think you’d find yourself taken more seriously if you were to follow your own advice.

Your very first post on this thread was to suggest that people should read The Ominous Parallels. Following your own advice, perhaps you should do the work of summarizing The Ominous Parallels, and explain how it responds to the objections Mark laid out in this thread.

If other books do that better, then do the work of summarizing their arguments. But that involves more than battling straw-men and repeating bumper-sticker slogans. It’s unclear to me why you resent other people suggesting that you get better read up on a subject, when you were quite willing to engage in just that behavior when the roles were reversed.

“Kant’s big thing is claiming that the senses are incapable of perceiving the real world.”

– No it isn’t. He claims that we can’t perceieve the “Thing-in-itself” – the phenomena of our experience are just the way that the world appears to us. This is not claim a claim that we do not perceive the “real” world. Phenomena and noumena are both “real”.

“He offers no jjustification for this other than they exist with an identity he claims to know. ”

– He offers a quite lengthy justification for this. But one that you find incomprehensible. That is your problem, not Kant’s.

“If men could not perceive the real world as he claims, how could he have known ANYTHING about Man’s senses?”

– As he makes no such claim, this criticism is invalid.

“To get around this obvious contradiction, Kant fabricated an unreal “phenomenal” world.”

– No, the phenomenal wolrd is not a fabrication. The phenomenal is just that name that he gives to the world that we experience – it’s reality is not in question. For Kant the idea that we would have sensations when there is nothing to sense is absurd. The noumena – things as they are – are what gives rise to Phenomena – the phenomena is our experience of these noumena. On the subject of the noumenal Kants say that the world obviously exists “For, otherwise, we should require to affirm the existence of an appearance, without something that appears – which would be absurd.” http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason/Preface_2

“Once he got people to accept this BS uncritically, he was free to claim anything with no fear of rational contradiction because he completely undercut rationality itself.”

– He had no interest in people accepting these things uncritically, saying in the preface to the second edition “I have observed, with pleasure and thankfulness, in the pages of various reviews and treatises, that the spirit of profound and thorough investigation is not extinct in Germany, though it may have been overborne and silenced for a time by the fashionable tone of a licence in thinking, which gives itself the airs of genius” http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason/Preface_2

“His “phenomenal world” is pure mysticism. Hocus-pocus.”

– No it is just the name for the world we all experience – the world that we see, touch, taste, hear and feel. His task is to see if there is any possibility of knowledge not derived from the phenomenal world – i.e metaphyical knowledge.

“You think I should take this seriously?”

– No. But you should take seriously that idea that criticism from a position of ignorance is rather pointless. If you are going to offer criticism, you should at least try and understand what he actually says rather than just proudly displaying that ignorance.

I recommend a close reading of at least the two prefaces Kant provides to get and idea of his opinions and his description of his task. You are not required to take hime seriously, but one should not be averse to making a serious attempt at understanding what he is actually saying.

It’s simply untrue that Kant is “the most influential philosopher,” if you take that to mean modern philosophy has now adopted some version of Kant’s arguments. For the most part, time has now passed Kant by.

Whether you want to take intellectual history seriously is up to you. No one here receives a commission on “converting” you toward Kant or away from Rand. This isn’t a battle, and there’s nothing to be won or lost here. It’s hardly as though Kant and Rand form the two axes of philosophical discussion, anyway. My objection with you (such as it is) is more over procedure than substance.

I submit to you that — if you’re not on the “same planet” as “us” (and whatever could that mean, really?) — it’s not because “we’ve” chosen to drink Kantian Kool-Aid over Randian Kool-Aid. Rather, it’s because “we’ve” chosen to do the hard work of trying to understand and integrate many different, often subtle (and in Kant’s case, very poorly written) arguments, from a number of different intellectual traditions.

For my part, I’m wouldn’t dream of assigning you the painful task of reading Kant’s first Critique all over again. Life’s too short. Perhaps just read a pithy and lively secondary source. For example, I actually enjoyed Roger Scruton’s Kant: A Very Short Introduction:

Scruton is an excellent writer (and if it aids the digestion, he’s a staunch political/cultural conservative and devotee of Edmund Burke). So, even if you find yourself re-convinced that Kant is on to nothing, I think you’ll have a better time doing so, and you’ll be able to form more cogent arguments against Kant than you have done so far.

Daniel, Geoff, Mark, qapla, swallerstein, Adam Y, Benjamin Byron (even Harry Binswanger, though he is a professional Objectivist who acturally reasons about his position even though it still seems faulty):

You have all been quite conciliatory, generous, patient, kind,, reasonable, considerate, even caring in responding to Burke.

Unfortunately, Burke’s self-referential authoritarian need to simply argue everyone into submission (master-slave position) was reflected in his repetitive if-then argumentation (in the guise of rationality) and assertion that Rand (Burke) is the way, the truth, and the light. (At least he agreed to respect Mark by retiring from PEL.)

This solipsistic position is not amenable to reason of course, just to domination and submission. I think that this is precisely the master-slave position which Nietzsche was addressing. Hopefully, we can identify this position early on in the future and not give it false attention. Appreciate your efforts all, and regards to your reasonability, Wayne.

:sigh: The podcast hasn’t even posted yet, and already the Rand disciples are out on the attack. How can we all be so close minded as to not be open minded to the one-and-only truth, case closed? It’s so similar to the New Atheists – a religious dedication to an idea that is allegedly ‘rational.’ Set up some more pews in the Church of Reason, here they come a’preachin’.

“Glen says:
June 20, 2013 at 5:21 pm
I am sorry that you think people are hopelessly selfish

I hope for your own sake that that view doesn’t warp your social life or personal happiness.

As to the point about anarchist violence, the ones who murdered property owners were often ostracized by the more mature anarchists who knew violence begets violence and is only legitimate in self-defense. Killing property owners is a crime, I agree.

I would point out too however that capitalism was imposed by force and violence too, such as with the land enclosure acts and the extermination of natives to appease the gods of private property (we have locke to thank for that), so there is enough accusation to go around. I cannot appeal to the no true scotsman fallacy and neither can you.

cheers”

First I’m not saying lets compare atrocities of capitalists against communists/socialists in the useless way you get in Christians versus atheists arguments.

And I’m not saying capitalism is wonderful and fair etc. It’s not.

And I’m not saying that humans are hopelessly selfish and not able to cooperate or experience selfless love or compassion etc.

But I think that actually the opposite lies at the heart of socialism, not altruism, genuine selfless giving, but selfishness.
It seems pretty selfish to expect people to work long hard days in the fields or long hard dangerous days on and oil rig and not respect them/that and pay them. (they should probably get paid even more)
So I can sit here on my computer all day.

” Government is the great fiction, through which everybody tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”
Frederic Bastiat

your comment
“this episode is about objectivist epistemology, the subject should not even turn to politics”

I agree but with Ayn Rand the usual is the “right” Ayn Rand is correct and the “left” Ayn Rand is a bad person or you get some moral/ethical objection which is what started this above from swallerstein (and Burke) and then you commented about this also adding.

But it’s inevitable because her philosophy is deeply political whether we like it or not and that’s why she is so liked and disliked.

Texts should speak for themselves. We don’t tend to have guests unless they require special decoding or unless some fan of the show volunteers. Asking whether the texts present good arguments by our experienced lights seemed a perfectly fine approach and much preferable to a squabble with someone like Burke. There are plenty of places online already where folks can hear from Randian scholars.

That makes sense. I agree with you (in the episode) that Rand is a gateway drug into philosophy. She was for me, but now I am a platonist/levinasian and have returned to my true nature. Still, there are mature ‘objectivists’ who are not Burke, and it’d be interesting to see how a mature version of my former self (Harry Binswinger, perhaps) would interact with the philosophical self I currently am.

Thanks guys. I think this episode may become a gateway drug to deconstructing Rands’s arguments and more practically, dismantling the surquedrous sermons of her devotees at parties…and in party politics.

Whether Rand cared about spending/wasting time understanding anything philosophical beyond “A=A” (which for anyone who understands the natural world, is the fundamental error of the Platonization of “objective reality”), I am inspired to improve my own understanding of these Roarkian building materials of philosophical argument. While Nietzsche respected Aristotle, I imagine that his own and only use for Rand would be to induce whooping laughter, which could aid digestion. Zarathustra said to his followers: “Go away now…perhaps I have tricked you!”, which is hardly what you find from the Üntermenchen in the Randyarmy.

Here is a surprisingly fair, right side of the bell curve review of two Rand biographies by assymptotic Chuck Murray. I wonder how the “immorality” of her personal life sets with her tea-carriers in Republican circles.

Finally, there was the cult surrounding Rand that developed during the 1960s. Reasoned discourse with Rand became impossible unless you began by accepting her pronouncements about everything—then you could argue the logic of your position. What had been lively back-and-forth explorations of ideas in the early 1950s became sessions at which the students sat at the feet of the master, “shivering, scared children who dared not say the wrong thing lest they incur her wrath,” in the words of John Hospers. The lifelong aspect of Rand’s personality that had fueled the brilliance of her novels, the capacity to imagine the world as she wanted it to be rather than the world as it is, had taken over real life. She had constructed a reality in which, if she so decreed, A was Z, and she lived within it for the rest of her life.

If someone were to do an intellectual history of popular philosophy in the 1950’s they might see Rand as a competitor to Korzybski’s General Semantics. The Count classified himself as an anti-Aristotelian. Are there any bios out there that see Rand’s relationships to other American gurus of the period, like Korzybski and L. Ron Hubbard (of the Dianetics period)?

a bunch of dudes that feel threatened by a more creative/successful person that happens to be female —- who gives a fuck if she was a conceited bitch? you don’t think plato walked around like a dick-head? that said, truly was an excellent verbal gang rape of a woman that is laughing at all the petty squabbling — its so much easier to “adhere” (or not adhere) to someone else rather than face the dick-head in the mirror

I’m happy to entertain the possibility that my reading of Rand was motivated by misogyny.

Here goes…[entertaining…]

Nope. Not motivated by misogyny. Rather her uncompromising refusal to engage in dialogue with any counter-position or criticism of her polemical proclamations. In particular in the Objectivist Epistemology paper I was astounded that she didn’t take on Wittgenstein’s criticism of Augustine’s notion of language, of which hers was simply a regurgitation. That is until a snide one sentence dismissal on page 50.

As to her being more creative and successful: I’ll grant that she is and likely will remain more influential. I’d recommend that you save the rape metaphor for more appropriate targets as it’s a disservice to the actual trauma of rape to apply it to our conversation. We were significantly less harsh on her than she was to her critics and other philosophers.
–seth

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